For those who are technically-inclined, you probably already know what this means; for those who aren’t, let me offer a short explanation. Right now, every computer that can be accessed on the public internet has a unique address, and there are around 4.3 billion “available” addresses. The reason for the quotation marks, though, is that this is a theoretical maximum, and the reality is that about half of these addresses aren’t available for use, which means that there’s an ever-present worry that we will run out of addresses to use on the internet. One solution to this problem is a new method of addressing internet-enabled devices, a method called IPv6, and with it comes the ability to support 340 undecillion addresses (or 3.4 x 1038 addresses, or 340 billion billion billion billion, addresses — which is enough for 670 quadrillion addresses per cubic millimeter of the Earth’s surface). Since we have somewhere around a decade before the need to move to IPv6 becomes urgent, though, it’s not yet in widespread use on the internet.

What EarthLink’s R&D project allows you to do today is buy a Linksys wireless router, download a custom firmware for the router, sign up for an account, and set up your own IPv6 network lickety-split. And the cool thing is that the wireless router will continue to protect the network from access from the outside on the old-style network (the one addressed using the old scheme), but will let you configure full access via the new addressing scheme — which means that you can set up public servers! That’s just cool.

I don’t have a router on which to play with this quite yet, so I’ll be interested to hear other peoples’ experiences. Perhaps in the next week or two, I’ll justify playing a bit myself as well…

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Who am I?

I'm Jason Levine, and have been keeping this site since the waning days of 1999. I'm a physician, a husband, a father, a scientist, an uncle, a photographer, and an unapologetic geek. I currently live in Washington, DC, and wear the two hats of a bioinformatics researcher and a clinical pediatric hematologist and oncologist.